Children Of The Magenta Line

There are numerous past examples of this sort of thing. Automation in aviation is really hard to get right. If the automation can fail then the pilots need to be able to perform whatever it was going to do. If the automation fails rarely then the pilots may not get enough practice. But if the automation normally does a better job than the pilots, there’s a tension with letting them get more practice on real flights. A recent(ish) example is the Asiana crash in SF. They had pretty much perfect conditions for a hand-flown visual approach, but they were out of practice, got behind the airplane, and it snowballed. There’s an excellent lecture about this called Children of the Magenta Line. The magenta line being the flight path or direction indicator on an autopilot, and the discussion is about pilots who constantly reconfigure the autopilot to direct the plane instead of just taking over. [this video]

Bainbridge [1] is interesting, but dated. A more useful version of that discussion from slightly later is "Children of the Magenta", [2] an airline chief pilot talking to his pilots about cockpit automation and how to use it. Requires a basic notion of aviation jargon. There's been progress since then. Although the details are not widely publicized, enough pilots of the F-22, F-35, or the Gripen have talked about what modern fighter cockpit automation is like. The real job of fighter pilots is to fight and win battles, not drive the airplane. A huge amount of effort has been put into simplifying the airplane driving job so the pilot can focus on killing targets. The general idea today is that the pilot puts the pointy end in the right direction and the control systems take care of the details. An F-22 pilot has been quoted as saying that the F-22 is far less fussy than a Cessna as a flying machine. For the F-35, which has a VTOL configuration (B) and a carrier-landing configuration (C), much effort was put into making VTOL landing and carrier landing easy. Not because pilots can't learn to do it, but because training tended to obsess on those tasks. The hard part of Harrier (the only previous successful VTOL fighter) was learning to land the unstable beast without crashing. There were still a lot of Harrier crashes. The hard part of Naval aviator training is landing on a carrier deck. Neither of these tasks has anything to do with the real job of taking a bite out of the enem

There is relatively well-know presentation from 1997 by American Airlines captain Warren Van Der Burgh called "Children of Magenta" that talked about the risk of crew being too dependent on the guiding magenta-colored lines of the autopilot on their screens: * [this video] * [link] * [link] Some of the pros and cons of cockpit automation: * [link] Generally automation exists on a spectrum, and the pilot should be able to select its level depending on the circumstances: > In Van’s presentation he describes three levels of automation: > *The pilot manually flying the aircraft. > *The pilot using the flight director, autopilot, and autopilot modes to fly the aircraft for a short period of time. For example: Heading select, Flight Level Change, Vertical Speed, Indicated Airspeed, etc. > *The pilot using the FMS to command the autopilot to fly the aircraft for hours at a time. * [link]

> Driving doesn’t require an advanced degree in physics. It’s mostly a mish mash of fairly mundane tasks. Generally not wrong, but when it becomes non-mundane, it can become so in a hurry. This is why I'm sometimes skeptical about statistics that say " x% of airplane crashes are human error ". Well maybe, but by the time the humans get involved the automated systems have often thrown up their proverbial hands and digitally exclaimed " Jesus take the wheel ". I think having computers take over the mundane parts may help collision rates as people can get numbed and bored by the monotony. One has to be careful about having the right level of automation and control for the given situation, as per the famous "Children of the Magenta Line" presentation: * [this video] > “Children of the magenta line” has become shorthand for pilots who manage and monitor systems but lack the stick-and-rudder skills to fly the airplane with authority. You may hear it wielded as an epithet in a discussion of “real pilots” versus “kids these days.” But in many cockpits today, automation illiteracy may be as dangerous as automation dependency. Vanderburgh’s insights shouldn’t drive us to reject automation altogether, but rather put it in its proper place in our pilot toolkits. Just as you should hand-fly regularly to keep your stick-and-rudder skills sharp, you should also practice using the technology available in the aircraft you fly. * [link] * [link] * [link] * [link]

Both unsophisticated lay observers and capital/owners tend to fault operators ... for different reasons. Accident studies and, in particular, books like _Normal Accidents_[1] push back on this assumptions: "... It made the case for examining technological failures as the product of highly interacting systems, and highlighted organizational and management factors as the main causes of failures. Technological disasters could no longer be ascribed to isolated equipment malfunction, operator error, or acts of God." It is well accepted - and I believe - that there were a multitude of operator errors during the Air France 447 flight but none of them were unpredictable or exotic and the system they were tasked with operating was poorly designed and unhelpfully hid layers of complexity that suddenly re-emerged during tremendous "production pressure". But don't take my word for it - I appeal to authority[2]: "Automation dependent pilots allowed their airplanes to get much closer to the edge of the envelope than they should have ..."[3]. or: @ 14:15: "... we see automation dependent crews, lacking confidence in their own ability to fly an airplane are turning to ther autopilot ..."[4]. [1] [link] [2] Captain Vanderburgh [3] Children of Magenta: [link] [4] [this video]